IBM Grabs Green Supercomputing Title

IBM's Blue Gene/Q supercomputer has topped the Green500.org list as the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.

According to
Green500.org, IBM supercomputers are the most energy-efficient in the world.
In fact, the
latest Supercomputing 'Green500 List' announced by Green500.org shows that a prototype
of IBM's next-generation Blue
Gene/Q supercomputer is No. 1 on the list.

The Green500
provides rankings of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. The
organization raises awareness about power consumption, promotes alternative
total cost of ownership performance metrics, and works to ensure that
supercomputers only simulate climate change and not create it. The Green500
list has three releases per year: November, February and June

The latest
list shows that six of the top 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the
world are built on IBM high-performance computing technology, IBM said. The
list includes supercomputers from China to Germany and the United States that
are used for a variety of applications such as astronomy, climate prediction
and life sciences. IBM also holds over half the top 100 positions on this list,
IBM said.
Energy
efficiency, including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding
workloads, has long been a core design principle in developing IBM systems,
according to IBM officials. Energy-efficient supercomputers can allow IBM
clients to realize critical cost savings by lowering power consumption and
reducing expenses associated with cooling. For example, for every $1 spent on
electricity with the largest petascale system on the Green500 list, clients
would spend less than 40 cents on a system based on IBM Blue Gene/Q and would
be 2.5 times more energy-efficient, IBM said in a press release.
IBM Blue
Gene/Q is scheduled to be deployed in 2012 by two of the U.S. Department of
Energy's national laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and
Argonne National Laboratory, both of which collaborated closely with IBM on the
design of Blue Gene, influencing many aspects of the system's software and
hardware, IBM said.
Meanwhile,
Columbia University and the University of Edinburgh contributed to Blue Gene/Q's
processor chip design. Both institutions plan to use the system to advance QCD
(quantum chromodynamics), which is a part of the study of particle physics.
For its part,
IBM offers the broadest range of supercomputers represented on the Green500
List, including Blue Gene, Power servers, System x iDataPlex, BladeCenter and
hybrid clusters, IBM said.
Moreover, an
IBM supercomputer is also No. 1 on the Graph500 list, IBM said. Backed by a
steering committee of over 30 international HPC experts from academia, industry
and national laboratories, the Graph 500 is a set of large-scale benchmarks for
data-intensive applications-an important metric as information increases
exponentially.
Argonne
National Lab's Blue Gene/P supercomputer "Intrepid" is No. 1 on the
list after analyzing the largest graph ever on a parallel machine. Graph
algorithms are a core part of many analytics workloads. The Blue Gene/P-based "Jugene"
supercomputer at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre is No. 1 on the Graph500.
In related news ETI (E.T.
International), a provider of
system software solutions for hybrid and many-core hardware architectures,
announced that it helped achieve four spots on the June 2011 Graph 500 List,
including three in the top 10 and one with the second-highest performance per
core, as unveiled at the ISC'11
show in Hamburg, Germany. Supercomputers using ETI's SWARM
(SWift Adaptive Runtime Machine) runtime environment came in at Nos. 6, 8 and 9
for their performance on the Graph 500 benchmark, ETI officials said.
ETI's SWARM
delivered the best multi-node results for every scale problem to which it was
submitted, ETI said. Specifically, when running SWARM, the Texas Advanced
Computing Center's Lonestar 4 came in at No. 6. At 512 nodes, Lonestar
delivered 8.1 giga-edges per second (GE/s). In the eighth spot, SWARM's
performance on Sandia National Lab's Red Sky at 512 nodes delivered 9.5 GE/s,
almost double the speed of MPI on the same machine. And at 256 nodes, Intel's
Endeavor was No. 9 on the list when running SWARM, at 6.9 GE/s, an incredible
11-fold improvement over MPI. Also using SWARM, Intel's Discovery placed 26th
on the list at a single node, and was one of three special mentions for its
achievement of the second-highest performance per core at 17.625 million
traversed edges per second per core.
"These
systems' performance on the Graph 500 is a validation of the power of ETI's
technology to allow programmers to realize the capacity of advanced many-core
computing systems," Rishi Khan, vice president of research and development
at ETI, said in a statement. "SWARM's
impressive results underscore how critical it is to put the right runtime
environment in place in order to exploit the parallelism of advanced
machines. The Graph 500 benchmark
is one we take very seriously as an effective measure of a computer's ability
to efficiently solve the more advanced, data-driven problems that are so
pervasive in today's applications."
ETI officials
said the company's SWARM runtime environment was developed specifically to
address the performance challenges presented by the intersection of massively
parallel software applications and hybrid many-core computing systems. The
software enables easy and efficient programmability of applications for
many-core computing systems, and is one of many components of ETI's system
services, including benchmarking, hardware and software design, performance-critical
programming and consulting, the company said.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.